DASZ ALEX Multitrack Music Production System Hands-On Demo

At the 2018 NAMM Show, DASZ was demoing the ALEX, a hardware sequencer and synthesizer that can be expanded to meet your needs.

ALEX is a scalable hardware system with up to 16 stereo tracks, four displays, and an easy-to-use interface. Its distributed hardware and software technology enables multiple hardware modules to function as one integrated music machine.

Find it very interesting.
However don’t understand yet about the audio in / out. If I’m reading the site and hearing this video correctly, each track is stereo. However a single Dasz module, whether main or extension, has no audio inputs by default. You’ll need an expansion card that will give you 4 mono inputs, 4 mono outputs. Now since there are 4 tracks in each module and these are stereo each, I seem to miss some inputs / outputs, or is it possible to add a second I/O card to each module?
Anxiously waiting for some more (hands on) demo’s before diving deeper into this.

I like the form factor, which has a bit of Novation’s display ethic to it. It also has a clean, made-for-EDM feel, although I know you can use it your own way. The one minor drawback is the wide range of equally effective options like Ableton. You’d have to commit big-time to really justify this for the price. OTOH, I’ll bet people will buy it with just one add-on expander and put their outboard gear in the loop, making it a tidy package. It needs more than 1 gb of onboard RAM per unit, but the SD card is appreciated. They’ll sell a few more to Roland System 1 and 8 users because you can turn the controls green. Ha ha.

@Dave: as I understand it does not need 1Gb per unit, but it offers 1Gb onboard RAM, most of which is available for your own use in audio recording, sequencing etc, etc. Now if you take one unit, which has 4 stereo tracks, CD quality will take about 706 kByte per second, giving you roughly 23 minutes of recording time (not considering the looper function of course). Not bad, but when talking 8-track recording per module additional memory on an SD card will always be convenient.

I’d like to see how the music is made vs the live performance aspects of it. I think last year we saw the same thing, knobs fiddling, but not many of the synth and sequencer functionality. They look pretty interesting and software will always trump any hardware price, 1 day people will understand that but not yet today:) Still, they innovate with hardware and add a few plugins and bug fixes with software.